Geographies
Stonesoft's corporate headquarters are located in Finland. The company has four main market areas:
•Americas (USA; Canada, Mexico and Brazil),
•Europe (Nordic countries, DACH, UK, Italy, Spain, France, Benelux)
•Emerging Markets (Russia, North Africa and Middle East) and
•APAC (Thailand, India and China).
The company has a global go-to-market model for sales and marketing, support and training. The sales and marketing organization relies on local resources to support and adapt to local market maturity and conditions. Stonesoft local resources work in close co-operation with channel partners.
Stonesoft focuses on enterprise customers who often have wide geographical reach. To be able to support these customers, Stonesoft has an extensive partner network. Stonesoft has both local partnerships to support local needs and regional and global partnerships with leading organizations, such as Siemens Business Services, Fujitsu Services and IBM Global Services.
Country organizations are supported by global support services, available 24/7, depending on customer SLAs. In addition, Stonesoft has second-line support services available for channel partners to further enhance their support offerings.
Stonesoft training services operate according to a two-layer model, where Stonesoft provides training services, and Stonesoft Authorized Training Sites are responsible for initiating training services for customers.
Messaging
Stonesoft's marketing strategy integrates both marketing and communications strategy. The marketing strategy is built on identifying and understanding metrics of key stakeholders; customers, channel partners, investors, media, analysts, potential employees and society.
The main customer focus is on enterprise customers, who have a geographically distributed organization with a great need for business continuity and security due to high transaction volume or value or due to compliance requirements. These customers typically face business-initiated security challenges as they use e-services extensively as a part of their daily operations.
Customer messaging has been split into two categories: technical decision-makers and business decision-makers. The content of our messaging differs according to the intended audience to meet their specific expectations. Stonesoft currently has industry specific messaging for the following industry verticals: finance, public administration, retail, health care, and legal services. These industry segments are also in line with the coverage model of the sales organization.
With two decades of experience, Stonesoft provides real-world solutions that are designed to solve customers’ network security and business challenges.
Operational excellence
Stonesoft's Security Engine (NGN) platform is designed for organizations who need both network security and service availability, and for whom the usual combination of multiple security and availability solutions is too complex and too cumbersome to manage.
The Security Engine is highly adaptable and enables business continuity through secure and continuous business communicatiosn over the internet while simplifying security infrastructure. Stonesoft has unified FW, VPN, IPS, SSL VPN, load balancing, and high availability, into one security platform, with centralized management, situational awareness for excellent network traffic visibility, and fast reaction times for administrators.
Empowering the business
Stonesoft's Security Engine platform enables resource optimization. This is not limited to human resources (OPEX related), but includes investments in tangible assets as well (CAPEX).
Unified manageability and remote, fail-safe upgrades with Multi-Link and Multi-Link VPN technologies enable cost efficiency and business support.
Stonesoft solutions provide a unified network security architecture with high availability allowing the customer to have "always-on" access to business-critical applications and data.
Centralized management lowers customers’ administrative costs and reaction times and raises security levels – while supporting customer decision-making with advanced monitoring, analysis and reporting.
Unified management offers flexible scalability that supports changing business needs, while reducing downtime and delivering higher performance.
Customer channel engagement
The stonesoft sales strategy is built on Stonesoft Direct Touch Sales organization and cooperation with Stonesoft channel partners. The Stonesoft Direct Touch Sales organization executes the following stages in the sales process at the end-user: demand and budget generation, consulting, technical positioning, and piloting. These are usually the most challenging phases in the sales process, and therefore Stonesoft focuses on these stages to ensure a successful outcome.
The Direct Touch Sales organization is backed up with technical pre-sales engineers to ensure that customer expectations for the solution are met. All phases in the sales cycle are transparently monitored by management with a sales force automation tool that enables pipeline management, forecasting, customer relationship management, and sales force activity management. The tool is also used to focus and align the marketing & PR actions to target customers.
The Direct Touch Sales organization also plays a vital role in the product development process by listening to customers and sharing the customers’ voice with product management and rest of the organization. This practice is a fundamental part of developing solutions that help customers solve their existing and future business challenges.
Stonesoft channel partners are engaged in the sales process when an offer is made. The partner builds the offer to the customer, backed up by Stonesoft when needed. The partner handles the delivery of goods and value added-services, training the end-user to administer the solution, and takes care of support and maintenance over the ownership period. When the solution needs to be migrated, the sales cycle starts again, but now in joint effort with the partner.
Support and maintenance services are provided according to a two-layer model, where first line support services are provided by Stonesoft channel partners and backed up by Stonesoft Support services, which are available 24/7 depending on the SLAs.
Stonesoft is committed to turning partnerships into mutual successes. We are committed to conducting business with a limited number of selected, certified channel partners worldwide. This commitment is fundamental to our long term strategy, where one of the key values is to be able to maintain sustainable and predictable co-operation with the certified channel partners.
Stonesoft values long-term strategic partnerships with partners to jointly deliver significant value to customers, not just maintaining a traditional product resell channel. We aim to keep our partnership model simple, therefore minimizing the costs of becoming a Stonesoft Partner and maintaining partnership status.
Stonesoft offers partners a straightforward channel assignment program to generate value for their customers as quickly as possible. The categorized channel program, with a limited number of selected partners, provides excellent opportunities for differentiation in the enterprise security market, for conducting profitable business, and providing added value to the customers.
Innovation
Stonesoft places strong emphasis on innovative research and development and on protecting its inventions. The focus is on developing both new and existing high-availability network security solutions. Stonesoft has been an innovative player in the network security market since the introduction of the StoneBeat high-availability solution in 1996.
Stonesoft was the first company to provide firewall/VPN high-availability solutions, firewall/VPN clustering solutions, ISP multi-homing solutions and Multi-Link VPN solutions.
Stonesoft has a strong patent portfolio with 20 granted patents in the US and 18 in Europe, and nearly 20 patent applications pending.
The patent portfolio contains, for example, a patent called "Data Transmission Control Method" (patent number 6,912,200), which covers the VPN component of Multi-Link functionality and the connection selection method where both ends of the communication are protected by the StoneGate platform. The patented solution is unique because of the method used to select the connections and the ability to determine a quality factor for each. The quality factor sends information between the sites to ensure the fastest and most reliable combinations of connections. The patented technology overcomes availability and latency issues in the internet and ensures transparent and fault-tolerant VPN tunnels. Data flow is never interrupted by lost connections between the firewall and outside networks and overall bandwidth is increased compared to networks using a single provider.
Customer experience
The Stonesoft support program consists of support, software maintenance and a hardware replacement service. There are two service levels for support – Premium Support and Basic Support.
Support services are provided globally 24/7. First-line support can be purchased either from a Stonesoft channel partner or directly from Stonesoft. Stonesoft has two support centers, one in Helsinki, Finland and one in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Our aim is to provide quality service to our customers, and all the people taking calls in our support centers have a strong technical background.
Our hardware replacement service guarantees to customers that if they experience problems with their appliances, Stonesoft will send a replacement unit as soon as possible. The hardware replacement service is available up to 39 months after the purchase of an appliance.
When a customer chooses premium support, support services are available 24/7 with a two-hour response time. In the case of basic support, response time is next business day and the service hours are 8-5.
The Stonesoft Management Center provides unified management for Stonesoft Firewall, VPN and IPS solutions. When it comes to security, corporations are often forced either to use different management tools for each security product, or to sacrifice manageability and use so-called "unified management" for systems that were not initially designed to be managed together. The result is inefficiency, higher costs for training and an overall decrease in security due to the administrator's inability to effectively manage the security environment. In contrast, Stonesoft products have been designed to fully benefit from a unified management system.
One of Stonesoft's design principles has always been to create a robust product that meets the real-world challenges of demanding environments. As such, Stonesoft solutions have always been an excellent choice for securing large network installations, as they include a vast set of innovative functionalities that reduce the costs of managing and maintaining distributed environments.
http://www.stonesoft.com/en/company/investors/inbrief/strategy/ |
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